Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea, at that.…
They did as they were asked and they put the families on — Linda Morris, and Mary Schuster, and the children. The children, of course, knew nothing of what was happening — they had been kept from school since the real uproar had started in the Press and naturally the newspapers had been kept from them too, and the television had also been forbidden; and they were not present when their mothers actually spoke to the men in the capsule.
Schuster said, “It’s going to be all right, Mary. The fault’s corrected. Don’t worry about a thing.” They were all keeping off the real trouble, as if by mutual consent, though Schuster knew the wives must have been told by this time. “Just don’t worry, that’s all!”
“We’ll try not to, Greg.” The technics of two-way radio kept the conversation formal, but her voice was beginning to falter already. “Oh, Greg.…” She let go the transmit switch.
“I said, don’t worry! I mean that.” Schuster’s voice was sharp with his own anxiety — for his family, for Morris, for himself as well and for what was bound to happen on a world-wide scale. “I’ll be back… darling, I know it’s not easy, but you have to trust me now more than ever before. The fault in the system’s absolutely okay now… we’re fine, all of us, just fine.” Still no mention on either side about the Eastern threat. “I’m going to bring Skyprobe down… me and Wayne between us, that is.” He was aware all the time of Danvers-Marshall’s gun, of the scientist’s watchful eyes behind the transparent visor of the space helmet. Once again he said inadequately, “Just don’t worry, Mary dear.”
Linda Morris came on the air after that, tearfully; then they put the children on, while the two women waited out of earshot. They didn’t trust themselves not to break down when they heard the kids speak.…
With the children both Schuster and Morris sounded cheerful, happy… no talk now of not worrying, it just didn’t arise. They were coming down safely and they would get a ticker-tape welcome on Broadway and the President himself would shake them by the hand and call them by their first names. “Know what I’m really looking forward to, though?” Morris asked. He answered his own question. “Seeing your ma pour me out a nice, long coke… with ice!”
“Sure, I bet.” This was Wayne junior, despairingly. “Scotch-on-the-rocks more like, pop!”
“Well — maybe. You kids sure have plenty cheek these days.” A pause, a longish one, and awkward. “See you, Junior.”
“Sure… see you, pop.”
“God bless, boy. Look after your ma and Bobbie.” A tremor had crept into his voice now and he was thinking: Oh, Christ, let’s get this over with.
“What was that, pop?” There was faint bewilderment, a lack of understanding.
“Oh… never mind. Just be good — till I get back. If you’re not I’ll tan your backside. Okay?”
“Okay.…"
Skyprobe IV raced on at her 27,000 m.p.h., away from the Kennedy base, away from the families’ voices, heading out once again across the globe. Later, as they came over the Pacific on the last leg of the next orbit, the spacemen passed unseeingly over the combined fleets searching, still without success, for the diversion base. Many of the ships and aircraft were well north now, however, and were beginning to narrow the field towards the Kuriles, although planes that had flown as close to the area as they dared, and had taken photographs, had reported no sign of activity on the fringes of that grim dead region.
Nevertheless, a strong suspicion about the Kuriles had been worrying the fleet Admiral in the Pacific and as Skyprobe IV raced on a signal was already on its way to Washington announcing a positive intention to investigate the islands more closely. Aboard his flagship, an aircraft-carrier, that admiral had already watched the Phantoms preparing for take-off under war conditions. The Phantom III F6C’s — ninety of them — were making ready to be shot off the four-and-a-half acre angled flight-deck at their 20-second intervals and zoom into the blue at speeds of up to 1,700 m.p.h., carrying their deadly loads of napalm bombs which, exhausting with their intense heat all the oxygen in the area of fall as the low-grade jet fuel and gelignite burned, killed by suffocation or roasting in a 200-foot orange flame and billowing smoke. The Phantoms also carried the “Willy Peters,” white phosphorous bombs that burned for almost forty minutes, even under water; and infra-red heat-seeker rockets that could home on a cigarette end from upwards of a thousand feet. Mechanics were preparing the Vulcan gatlings, known as Puff-the-magic-dragons… guns whose six revolving barrels fired a hundred rounds a second. When the admiral’s signal reached the Pentagon and the White House it found the US high command in no mood to send out a negative despite the risks; instead, certain detailed orders went out to the ICBM sites and the early-warning stations in Alaska and the eastern states, while the combat operations center of the joint US-Canadian North American Air Defence Command, deep in its concrete ‘city’ below the 9,565-foot Cheyenne Mountain in the Rockies, received orders putting it, in effect, on an immediate war footing.
That night, as the minutes ticked away to splashdown and certain world catastrophe, Shaw lay awake hour after hour, thinking, planning until he forced himself to relax and clear his mind with sleep. When he woke, he formulated something that just might work out.
At 0830 hours, with only half an hour left to go, the outer door was opened up and the four armed men marched again into the gangway between the cages and one of them unlocked the doors into each. Shaw and Ingrid were ordered out, under cover of the guns. When they were in the narrow gangway Shaw started to say something to the girl but was ordered brusquely to be silent.
“All right, you—” Shaw broke off with a grimace, and then gave a grunt of apparent pain and lifted one foot off the ground, his face contorting.
The man who seemed to be in charge of the party demanded irritably in English, “What is wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Shaw snapped. “I’m not a doctor. All I know is, it’s damn painful!”
The guard made a noise of anger and impatience. “It is no matter. Pain is to be accepted. Must walk. Must not now waste time.”
“Must be damned. I can’t put it on the ground. Someone’ll have to help me, that’s all… if you really want me to move. Personally, I’m quite willing to stay right here.” He was watching the man closely now; there was just one thing he could be sure of, and that was that whatever happened, whatever he did, these men weren’t high up enough in the hierarchy to take the risk of killing him or Ingrid. Neither Kaltizkin nor Rencke would be very pleased if they did that.
The guard glared, stamped his foot, seemed about to give Shaw a push along the alleyway, then thought better of it. If the Englishman’s pain became worse he might not function as required in the control room… the Comrades wouldn’t like that either. The man nodded at one of his subordinates. He spoke in his own language, then moved aside as the other man came along towards Shaw. The second man took Shaw’s left arm in a tight grip, right up beneath the armpit. He started to drag Shaw forward.
Shaw let his body go limp and then very suddenly he struck. He moved his right arm fast, got a grip on the man’s neck and, using all his strength, forced him across his body, freeing the grip on his upper arm. In the same instant as he grabbed the gun he felt the man’s neck crack.
He let the body drop and jumped backwards, the gun weaving to cover all the remaining men. “Keep very quiet!” he snapped. “Move inwards from the door or you’re all dead.” As he spoke a tremor, as at the rehearsal, ran through the silo, shaking the cell alleyway. The tremor increased and there was a high whine of electrically-driven machinery. The attractor-plate was rising, moving out on its stalk into the open air, making ready for the final act.